We’re struggling to deal with climate change and these selfish developers can think of nothing except building more factories. This is a global issue, we need a global solution: eschew factories and services for defining everything globally.
The quickest way to get a team of 10 contractors to turn 100 lines of basic code from a decent engineer into 2k, with 50 janky vulnerable dependencies, that needs to be babied with customized ide’s and multi-minute+ build times and 60m long recorded meetings.
Sure… That"s what libraries are for. No one hand-rolls that stuff. You can do all of that just fine (and, actually, in a lot less code, mostly because Java is so fucking verbose) without using the nightmare that is Spring.
Actually, there’s a lot to be said for being able to configure your spleamtomoter without needing to reverse the polarity on the stack cache rotator arm.
Seriously though, spring configurations are written in XML and you create variables, call functions, and have control flow. Effectively turning XML into a horrible twisted shadow of a programming language.
All in the name of “configurability” through dependency injection.
I’m fond of saying that all great code earns it’s right to become good code by starting as trash…
But I still think we should all quietly and politely let Spring die a simple dignified death, as soon as possible.
Out of wildly morbid curiosity, do Maven and Ant still shit all over each other to make sure no one has any real idea what the build inputs and outputs are?
I shouldn’t ask things I don’t really want to know, though. My inbox is gonna be full of Java apologists.
It was a markup language until someone decided to parse and execute it as a programming language. This person should be watched for other deranged behavior.
I use XML as markup language, what kind of deranged person thought to turn it into a programming language? My problems with the Lua API led me down the rabbit hole of making my own VM and implementation, not looking at a markup languge, then go “what if I used this for scripting?”.
When they make XML do these things (or the way Github Actions does it with YAML), they’re essentially creating a representation of the AST that the compiler would make internally from a mini language. So there’s a few possibilities:
They don’t know how compilers work and reach for a tool they do know
They know, but figure the problem at hand doesn’t need the complexity of a mini language and start the project the quick and dirty way, and it gets out of hand as they add features
They may or may not know, but they do get caught up in the hype of some other tool (likely what happened with XSLT)
At work we have a lot of old monolithic OOP PHP code. Dependency injection has been the new way to do things since before I started and it’s basically never used anywhere.
I assume most people just find it easier to create a new class instance where it’s needed.
I’ve never really seen a case where I think, “dependency injection would be amazing here” I assume there is a case otherwise it wouldn’t exist.
When we implemented it significantly improved our ability to write unit tests. It also allowed us to make more modular code due to the default of every class having an interface. So I’m all for it.
Yeah. Injection has a place in test patterns. Thankfully, it’s usually possible to hide injection from strongly affecting anything else that matters, as long as the team hates injection deeply enough.
In my opinion dependency injection solves a problem that doesn’t need to exist, and does it by adding even more obfuscation and complexity.
The problem is that the original gang of four design patterns had very little to say about managing effects. In old java code things like network and file IO often happen deep inside the object graph, hidden behind multiple impenetrable abstractions such that it’s impossible to run the logic without triggering the effect.
The wrong solution is to add even more obfuscation and abstraction, so that you can inject replacement classes deep inside the object graph where the effects happen. it solves the immediate problem of implementing tests, but makes everything else worse and more confusing.
The right solution is to surface all your effects at the top level of the call graph. The logic only generates data, and passes it back up to the top level of the program. The top level code then decides whether to feed this data into an effectful operation. Now all your code is easier to reason about, and in you can easily test the logic without triggering unwanted effects.
As a fellow PHP dev (working in laminas specifically) DI actually is fucking awful, there’s a distinction between a service factory pattern and this thing called DI which is similar to a service factory pattern but uses reflection based type sniffing to guess at which service you want where. I’d considered making a reference to it but PHP developers are few and far between these days.
Can we talk about annotations which are broken when you upgrade spring boot ? You are asked to upgrade some old application to the newest version of spring boot, application that you discover on the spot, the application does not work anymore after the upgrade, and you have to go through 10 intermediate upgrade guides to discover what could possibly be wrong ?
An application I’ve never heard or seen before that needs to be upgraded, and it breaks, so you now need to understand what the hell this application does so you can fix it properly.
Gradle, with it’s transitive dependency modifications is a huge pain in this area.
It used to be that if a library ended up having a flaw then it would be flagged and we would get the dependency updated. These days security block the “security risk” and you have to replace your dependencies dependency. Fingers crossed you can get it to actually test all the code paths.
If an second level project gets a flaw, and it’s used indirectly then we should really look at getting the import updated so that we know it works. If that import is abandoned then we should not be updating that second level dependency, either adopt and fix the first level dependency or look at an alternative.
Spring annotations in general. There’s a completely hidden bean context where every annotation seems to throw interceptors, filters, or some reflection crap into. Every stacktrace is 200 lines of garbage, every app somehow needs 500mb for just existing and if you add something with a very narrow scope, that suddenly causes something completely unrelated to stop working.
Realistically, DI and all the Spring crap does not add anything but complexity.
Our Spring service was so simple until we decided we needed annotations to handle the fetching of settings. Now we are corrupted with needless reflection.
My favourite take on DI is this set of articles from like 12 years ago, written by a guy who has written the first DI framework for Unity, on which are the currently popular ones, such as Zenject, based on.
The first two articles are pretty basic, explaining his reasoning and why it’s such a cool concept and way forward.
Followed by more articles about why he thinks it was a mistake, and he no longer recommends or uses DI in Unity in favor of manual dependency injection. And I kind of agree - his main reasoning is that it’s really easy for unnecessary dependencies to sneak up into your code-base, since it’s really easy to just write another [Inject] without a second thought and be done with it.
However, with manual dependency injection through constructor parameters, you will take a step back when you’re adding 11th parameter to the constructor, and will take a moment to think whether there’s really no other better way. Of course, this should not be an relevant issue with experienced programmers, but it’s not as inherently obvious you’re doing something potentially wrong, when you just add another [Inject], when compared to adding another constructor parameter.
Exactly. Dependency injection is good; if you need a framework to do it, you’re probably doing it wrong; if your framework is too magical, you’re probably not even doing it at all anymore.
Spring singleton beans are supposed to be stateless though, so they can’t be called variables. Maybe the DI aspect of Spring is less relevant today in the micro service era, but in the day Spring helped make layered monolith apps much cleaner.
Really? From my experience the opposite is the case. I work on a smallish team with 3 other developers and we also have a few spring services with < 100 classes and we constantly run into issues where making changes to a bean causes issues in another unrelated part of the codebase. I can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be with a larger codebase and more devs working on it.
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